Multipath fading is the fluctuation in a received signal's amplitude. It is caused by interference between two or more versions of the transmitted signal that arrive at a receiver at different times. This interference results from reflections from the ground and nearby structures. The amount of multipath fading depends on the intensity and propagation time of the reflected signals and the bandwidth of the transmitted signal. The received signal may consist of a large number of waves having different amplitudes, and phases, and angles of arrival. These components combine vectorally at the receiver and cause the received signal to fade or distort.
The fading and distortion change as the receiver and other objects in the radio environment move. These multipath effects depend on the bandwidth of the signal being transmitted. If the transmitted signal has a narrow bandwidth (i.e., the duration of the data bits transmitted is longer than the delay resulting from multipath reflections), then the received signal exhibits deep fades as the receiver moves in a multipath environment. This is known as flat fading. A significant amount of power control (e.g. increasing the transmit power and/or the receiver gain) is needed to compensate for deep fades. In addition, low data-rate signals experience distortion if the characteristics of the radio environment change significantly during the duration of a received data bit. The distortion is caused when movement of the receiver or nearby objects results in a Doppler frequency shift of the received signal that is comparable to or greater than the bandwidth of the transmit signal.
A wideband signal transmitted in a multipath environment results in a frequency-selective fade. The overall intensity of the received signal has relatively little variation as the receiver moves in a multipath environment. However, the received signal has deep fades at certain frequencies. If the duration of the data bits is smaller than the multipath delay, the received signals experience intersymbol interference resulting from delayed replicas of earlier bits arriving at the receiver.
Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) typically suffers from flat fading whereas multicarrier protocols, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), suffer from frequency-selective fading. CDMA typically suffers from both; however the direct sequence coding limits the effects of multipath to delays less than the chip rate of the code. Also, CDMA's capacity is limited by multi-user interference. Improved CDMA systems use interference cancellation to increase capacity; however, the required signal processing effort is proportional to at least the cube of the bandwidth. Furthermore, CDMA is susceptible to near-far interference, and its long pseudo-noise (PN) codes require long acquisition times. For these reasons, OFDM has been merged with CDMA.
OFDM has a high spectral efficiency (the spectrum of the subcarriers overlap) and combats frequency-selective fading. However, the amplitude of each carrier is affected by the Rayleigh law, hence flat fading occurs. Therefore, good channel estimation with an appropriate detection algorithm and channel coding is essential to compensate for fading. The performance of OFDM frequency diversity is comparable to the performance of an optimal CDMA system's multipath diversity (which requires a Rake receiver). Because diversity is inherent in OFDM, it is much simpler to achieve than in an optimal CDMA system. An OFDM system benefits from a lower-speed parallel type of signal processing. A Rake receiver in an optimal CDMA system uses a fast serial type of signal processing, which results in greater power consumption. In addition, the OFDM technique simplifies the channel estimation problem, thus simplifying the receiver design.
In multicarrier CDMA, a spreading sequence is converted from serial to parallel. Each chip in the sequence modulates a different carrier frequency. Thus, the resulting signal has a PN-coded structure in the frequency domain, and the processing gain is equal to the number of carriers. In multi-tone CDMA, the available spectrum is divided into a number of equiwidth frequency bands that are used to transmit a narrowband direct-sequence waveform.
Frequency-hopping spread spectrum can handle near-far interference well. The greatest benefit is that it can avoid portions of the spectrum. This allows the system to better avoid interference and frequency-selective fades. Disadvantages include the requirement for complex frequency synthesizers and error correction.
Time hopping has much higher bandwidth efficiency compared to direct sequence and frequency hopping. Its implementation is relatively simple. However, it has a long acquisition time and requires error correction.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,519,692 and 5,563,906 describe geometric harmonic modulation (GHM) in which preamble and traffic waveforms are created from multiple carrier frequencies (tones). The waveforms comprise tones incorporating a binary phase code where signal phases are 0 or −π/2. The binary phase offsets, which are applied to the tones, provide the spreading codes. Orthogonality of GHM signals is realized upon correlation with a reference signal at a receiver. A preamble carrier waveform is constructed by summing the tones. Therefore, the preamble signals are similar to MC-CDMA signals.
Each receiver monitors the preamble signals for its own phase code and then despreads and decodes the appended traffic waveforms. The traffic waveforms are products of the tones. The receiver generates a reference waveform from a product of tones having phase offsets that correspond to the receiver's phase code. The reference waveform is correlated with the received signals to produce a correlation result that is integrated over the data-bit duration and over all tones.
GHM uses binary phase offsets instead of differential phase offsets. Thus, GHM does not provide carriers with phase relationships that enable the superposition of the carriers to have narrow time-domain signatures. Consequently, received GHM signals require processing by a correlator, whereas signals that are orthogonal in time can be processed using simpler signal-processing techniques, such as time sampling and weight-and-sum. Furthermore, GHM does not achieve the capacity and signal-quality benefits enabled by time-orthogonal signals.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,628,517 shows a radio system that modulates an information signal onto multiple carrier frequencies. Received carriers are each converted to the same intermediate frequency using a bank of conversion oscillators. The received signals are then summed to achieve the benefits of frequency diversity. In this case, frequency diversity is achieved at the expense of reduced bandwidth efficiency. The process of converting the received signals to the same frequency does not allow orthogonality between multiple information signals modulated on the same carriers.
Each communications protocol presents different benefits and disadvantages. Benefits can be increased by merging different protocols, but only to a limited degree. There is a need for a flexible signaling protocol that can be adapted to different needs and criteria.